2.5 ACADEMIC AND SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION-ACE

This will enable the acquisition of new knowledge that will enable us to take decisions on the base of our Cosmo vision, our territories, nature and life itself.

2.5.1 Conceptual and Situational Development

Our educational background has been provided to us by the teachings between the practical and spiritual daily life. Both man and a women, have in the core of specific collective attributions, as well as complementary, with the aim of supplying the demands grown from the social group to which we belong to. Therefore, what we know, are and will be is constructed collectively between generations and generations throughout thousands of years, joining material life and spiritual teachings. Talking of 500 years of history is to try to hide a past and pretend to impose a truth. However, the alteration of our ancestors will not allow this prepotency and our history registers a time that goes further from the arrival of the Europeans. All millenary wisdom is registered in the rocks, in the pottery, in myths, songs, in the management of beings of the material and spiritual universe. Archeological findings are a proof of the presence and existence that we live since a time further beyond twelve thousand years (29).

Scientific and Academic Education will enable us to acquire new knowledge that in the set of our Cosmo vision, will allow us to take decisions over our territories, nature and life itself. As peoples, we are conscious that the Amazon is gazed at as a response to planetary deficiencies. In their course of historic appropriation, it was seen as a “demographic vacuum”, later on as the “lungs” and currently as the “world’s shop”. We believe that the existing socio biodiversity can maintain their biological, ecological and socio cultural patterns, even those spiritual ones. However, what is going on within the jungle, as well as in the natural environment and with its people, go on the contrary path. The “sustainable” development projects and the activities of economic exploitation, are placing it at risk and promoting the disappearance of Amazon peoples. The disappearance of the human being, guardians of sciences and generational technologies, is the elimination of the knowledge on animals and plants. In the Amazon, the universality are ourselves as peoples, our books are produced the most and its wisdoms have been developed through ages in our collective lives.

Our sciences are wisdoms experienced and extracted from the teachings of the objects of art by our ancestors. It is through these forms of teachings that we sustain our lifestyles, our journey and historic background. They are life practices that generate life and gain strength in each birth of a being, be it human or not. States and society in general need to look within themselves and within the material and spiritual life, as well as on the path that we are traveling and from there on, try to start looking at things from our values, build alternatives to the crisis of current societies. The use and management of natural resources has for centuries, strengthened our affirmation that we are not poor and much less miserable. What we currently live is the de-capitalization of our socio environment estate and due to this we are not willing to wait for the total collapse of our resources and of ourselves in the name of a development that is being imposed and that respond to other people’s needs. We hope that many are on our side, in this effort of keeping our own social, economic and cultural process with our teaching patterns, according to which we live and let live.

Our knowledge are not of public domain, they are of collective cultural and intellectual property, protected under our common rights. The unauthorized use and the improper appropriation are an usurpation (30). We register our position before marketing processes of our collective information, which are the fruit of our experiments and generational labor. Due to that, they can’t be treated and used as goods of private consumption and earnings of a few. Their use only makes sense if it is in function of a collectivity. This is what we want States and firms of different branches, either within the Amazon or in other regions, to know. It is our political and identity position, over the relationship process and the proximity that we desire to attain with other sectors of society, as well as with States.

We exhort that the diversity of the existing cultures in the world be respected and specially, those existing between us. If our different social patterns are not recognized, we cannot distinguish and guarantee our rights as such. If we still exist is due to our cultural diversity that has served as trenches that have disabled and are still protecting our destruction. Colonizers s well as new colonizers were not and will not be used to dealing with differences. In their limited vision, what they do not understand, they tend to make it disappear. However, we do not agree with this premise, to which we emphasize that our spirituality, our cultures and our gods, maintain us firm and more that anything, disposed to continue building a human world, both for us and for future generations, since we believe that we have not inherited the land of our ancestors, but that we lend it to future generations (31).

Our wisdom and privileged information are our big maloca, to which with the Amazon Indigenous Agenda, we go back to, that is, we value even more the ancestral wisdom, the harmonious relationship with the environment. It is the sense of pleasure in the dances that binds the body and soul, it is to protect our wisdoms, technologies and sacred places. It is to feel the maloca within every child of the sun, the wind, the water, the rocks, the trees, the stars and the universe. It is not being an individual but a collective, living in the circular time of the great return, where the future is always behind; it is the upcoming time, the present and the past ahead of us, with individual teachings and lessons and collectives of the immemorial life process.

The construction of the concepts and affirmations of our values can only be done in a collectivity. We, as peoples, are convinced that the equilibrium and the symbiosis between the material and spiritual realms determine our existence. A life inspired in the philosophy of Sacha Runa Yachai,-the wisdom of the man of the jungle-, which is composed of three great principles or our own codes. The “Suma Kausay”- the life in plenitude, integral, healthy on the spiritual, physical, ethical, moral and intellectual aspects. These facts allow our present and future generations to exist. The “Tukuy Pacha”, principle that refers to all the knowledge, wisdom and apprenticeship. It deals with the time needed to understand, comprehend and learn the things that belong to us as well as those of strangers. It allows us to see within the darkness, to listen within noise and to speak when there is no voice. The “Musuk Allpa”, does not only mean the new earth, but the sacred relationship with Pachamama, understood as all that integrates the Ukupacha, the Jawapacha and the Kaypacha. The key of these principles is the renovation,- the jungle as a set of things is born, grows, expands, gets sick, reproduces itself , dies and renews itself- a permanent cycle, so that land can always be renewed (32).